My friend Malcolm MacDonald, who has died aged 66, was a highly respected writer on music, who also used the professional name Calum MacDonald. He had a formidable intellect, an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, and a fluent and evocative use of language.
From the early 1980s he was editor of Tempo, a contemporary music magazine published by Boosey & Hawkes and then by Cambridge University Press. Under his editorship, Tempo covered a wide range of composers, from Hanns Eisler to the Swede Allan Pettersson, from Schoenberg to Havergal Brian. He did not include anything to do with popular music, even though he listened very widely to music of all kinds; Malcolm was marvellously catholic in his tastes.
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